A Chair on the Boulevard | Page 4

young man who she had supposed was starving; but wait a little! Her amazement increased when, to pay for the wine he had ordered, her companion threw on to the table a bank-note with a gesture absolutely careless.
She was in danger of distrusting her eyes.
"Is it a dream?" she cried. "Is it a vision from the _Thousand and One Nights_, or is it really a bank-note?"
"Mademoiselle, it is the mess of pottage," the young man answered gloomily. "It is the cause of my sadness: for that miserable money, and more that is to come, I have sold my birthright."
She was on a ship--no, what is it, your expression?--"at sea"!
"I am a poet," he explained; "but perhaps you may not know my work; I am not celebrated. I am Tricotrin, mademoiselle--Gustave Tricotrin, at your feet! For years I have written, aided by ambition, and an uncle who manufactures silk in Lyons. Well, the time is arrived when he is monstrous, this uncle. He says to me, 'Gustave, this cannot last--you make no living, you make nothing but debts. (My tragedies he ignores.) Either you must be a poet who makes money, or you must be a partner who makes silk,' How could I defy him?--he holds the purse. It was unavoidable that I stooped. He has given me a sum to satisfy my creditors, and Monday I depart for Lyons. In the meantime, I take tender farewells of the familiar scenes I shall perhaps never behold again."
"How I have been mistaken!" she exclaimed. And then: "But the hunger you confessed?"
"Of the soul, mademoiselle," said the poet--"the most bitter!"
"And you have no difficulties with the laundress?"
"None," he groaned. "But in the bright days of poverty that have fled for ever, I have had many difficulties with her. This morning I reconstituted the situation--I imagined myself without a sou, and without a collar."
"The little restaurant," she questioned, "where I saw you dining on the odour?"
"I figured fondly to myself that I was ravenous and that I dared not enter. It was sublime."
"The mont-de-pi��t��?"
"There imagination restored to me the vanished moments when I have mounted with suspense, and my least deplorable suit of clothes." His emotion was profound. "It is my youth to which I am bidding adieu!" he cried. "It is more than that--it is my aspirations and my renown!"
"But you have said that you have no renown," she reminded him.
"So much the more painful," said the young man; "the hussy we could not win is always the fairest--I part from renown even more despairingly than from youth."
She felt an amusement, an interest. But soon it was the turn of him to feel an interest--the interest that had consequences so important, so 'eart-breaking, so fatales! He had demanded of her, most naturally, her history, and this she related to him in a style dramatic. Myself, I have not the style dramatic, though I avow to you I admire that.
"We are in a provincial town," she said to the young man, "we are in Rouen--the workroom of a modiste. Have no embarrassment, monsieur Tricotrin, you, at least, are invisible to the girls who sew! They sew all day and talk little--already they are tristes, resigned. Among them sits one who is different--one passionate, ambitious--a girl who burns to be divette, singer, who is devoured by longings for applause, fashion, wealth. She has made the acquaintance of a little pastrycook. He has become fascinated, they are affianced. In a month she will be married."
The young man, Tricotrin, well understood that the girl she described was herself.
"What does she consider while she sits sewing?" she continued. "That the pastrycook loves her, that he is generous, that she will do her most to be to him a good wife? Not at all. Far from that! She considers, on the contrary, that she was a fool to promise him; she considers how she shall escape--from him, from Rouen, from her ennui-- she seeks to fly to Paris. Alas! she has no money, not a franc. And she sews--always she sews in the dull room--and her spirit rebels."
"Good!" said the poet. "It is a capital first instalment."
"The time goes on. There remains only a week to the marriage morning. The little home is prepared, the little pastrycook is full of joy. Alors, one evening they go out; for her the sole attraction in the town is the hall of varieties. Yes, it is third class, it is not great things; however, it is the only one in Rouen. He purchases two tickets. What a misfortune--it is the last temptation to her! They stroll back; she takes his arm--under the moon, under the stars; but she sees only the lamps of Paris!--she sees only that he can say nothing she cares to hear!"
"Ah, unhappy man!" murmured the poet.
"They sit at